Archive for June, 2014

Watts’ Nirvana

In the Buddhist context Nirvana or moksha, is described as the extinguishing of the fires that cause suffering. These fires are typically identified as the fires of attachment (raga), aversion (dvesha) and ignorance (moha or avidya). When the fires are extinguished, suffering (dukkha) comes to an end. The cessation of suffering is described as complete peace. Thus nirvana refers to the imperturbable stillness of mind after the fires of desire, aversion, and delusion have been finally extinguished.
In Hindu philosophy, it is the union with the divine ground of existence Brahman (Supreme Being) and the experience of blissful egolessness.

Alan Wilson Watts (1915-973) was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.Watts’s fascination with the Zen developed because that tradition embodied the spiritual, interwoven with the practical, as exemplified in the subtitle of his Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East. “Work,” “life,” and “art” were not demoted due to a spiritual focus.
Watts equated mystical experience with ecological awareness, and typically emphasized whichever approach seemed best suited to the audience he was addressing.

Watts felt that absolute morality had nothing to do with the fundamental realization of one’s deep spiritual identity. He advocated social rather than personal ethics. In his writings, Watts was increasingly concerned with ethics applied to relations between humanity and the natural environment and between governments and citizens.

In several of his later publications, especially Beyond Theology and The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, panentheism, and modern science, in which he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek (Lila), hiding from itself (Maya) by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise. In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourselves as an “ego in a bag of skin” is a myth; the entities we call the separate “things” are merely processes of the whole.

Watts also argues that Eastern philosophy and religion are not necessarily spiritual and world denying. For instance, the non-dualistic interpretation of Vedanta (the philosophy of the Upanishads) implies a kind of pantheism. The divine is identical with the material universe and with each individual being. The goal of religion is the mystical experience of our oneness with the divine/cosmos. This experience may require asceticism and contemplation. But it can just as well be spontaneous and effortless. It can hit you in the marketplace, on the battlefield, or in your turnip patch.
Mahayana Buddhism, moreover, stresses the unity of samsara and nirvana. Nirvana is not blissful annihilation, but a change of attitude in this life that allows freedom and detachment in the whirl and rush of material existence.

Watts had no patience with what he called “the aching legs school of Buddhism”, whose practicioners were prideful of their long, silent sittings. When the legs start to ache, he would say slyly, I prefer to get up and dance.

Some have commented that Watts concern to clear away philosophical hubris over spiritual existence negated as valueless any concern for environmental destruction at the hands of mankind.
By contrast with these views, Watts dialogue and books show how the illusion of the ego is linked with environmental destruction – in essence then if we orient our ‘selves’ rightly, that this will include caring for the Earth and co citizen species correctly.

“As a result of having a false sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our environment, and when that inappropriate action is magnified by a very powerful technology, we swiftly begin to see the results of a profound discord between man and nature. As is well-known, we are now in the process of destroying our environment…

It should be obvious however that the human being goes with the rest of the universe, even though we say in popular speech ‘I came into this world’. Now it is not true that you came into this world. You came out of it, in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant or a fruit comes out of a tree. And as an apple tree ‘apples’, the solar system in which we live, and therefore the galaxy in which we live, and therefore the system of galaxies in which we live, that system ‘peoples’. If people are intelligent – and I suppose we have to grant that ‘if’ – the energy which people express must also be intelligent, because one does not gather figs from thistles or grapes from thorns.

But it does not occur to the ordinary person to regard himself or herself as an expression of the whole universe. It should be obvious that we cannot exist except in an environment of air, earth, water and solar temperature, that all these things go with us and are as important to us as our internal organs such as our heart, brain, stomach and so forth.”

“Man as an organism is to the world outside like a whirlpool is to a river: man and world are a single natural process, but we are behaving as if we were invaders and plunderers in a foreign territory.”Dissarming the pseudo philosophical and religious intellectual nerosis of word play and mind games that may sound sensible but are actually meaningless, Watts empowers the receptive among us to freedom from endless obfuscation. In so doing, Watts provides a clear outline for the notion of thinking globally and taking action at a personal level, locally – in ones very orientation to life and the world around us.

Whilst Watts discouraged the chasing of philosophical devils because as he saw it the excercise is fundamentally futile, in terms of protecting the environment, I would say that he was one of its key facilitators.

Watts provided a holisitc ‘eco-spiritual framework’ which enabled many to understand our place in life, an explanation of how the environment and human existence are not seperate items, but coexistant expressions of the infinite and incomprehensible cosmos.

To destroy our own home, the life support system of our environment – is not simply to rob ‘our world’ of its is incomparable beauty, rather that it is to destroy our very selves.

Some of my favourite Watts’ quotes

“The special branch of science which studies the relation of living beings to their environments – ecology – shows beyond doubt that the individual organism and its environment are a continuous stream, or field, of energy. To draw a new moral from the bees and the flowers: the two organisms are very different, for one is rooted in the ground and broadcasts perfume, while the other moves freely in the air and buzzes. But because they cannot exist without each other, it makes real sense to say that they are in fact two aspects of a single organism. Our heads are very different in appearance from our feet, but we recognize them as belonging to one individual because they are obviously connected by skin and bones. But less obvious connections are no less real…”

Civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. (…) The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many ‘growing communities’ are as disastrous as cancer. That we do not feel this to be obvious is the result of centuries of habituation to the idea that oneself is only the envelope of skin and its contents, the inside but not the outside. The extreme folly of this notion becomes clear as soon as you try to imagine an inside with no outside, or an outside with no inside.”

“Civilization, as we have worked it out, is a system of screens which conceal the connections between events. (…) Bacon, as found packaged in the supermarket, gives no intimation of pig, and steaks appear as if they were entities like apples, having no relation to the slicing of dead cattle. To remove such screens is held to be as offensive and vulgar as to relieve one’s bowels in the gutter of a public street.” Alan Watts; Does It Matter? Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality.

“We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.”

Gwydion Caer Wydion

Gwydion (Goo-Eed-Yon), Caer Wydion the Celtic Bard born of the trees, at ‘the Castle of Gwydion’ which was the traditional Welsh name for the Milky Way ie under the Sky above ~Gwydion is a Celtic Bard, Sorcerer and Trickster of Welsh mythology, appearing most prominently in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, the Welsh Triads and the 14th century medieval Welsh book of poetry The Book of Taliesin by the Bard Taliesin, whose name means Radiant Brow.
Here we hear Gwydion recite a verse from the Cad Goddeu – the Battle of the Trees, found in the The Book of Taliesin which tells the story of a battle fought between Gwydion and Bran. Gwydion enchants the trees to fight as part of his army, which he is empowered to do as he is himself ‘Born Of Trees’ which is the meaning of his name.

In the section of the poem narrated here, Gwydion is declaring his magical lineage and shared spiritual existence with the underlaying forces below and beyond nature, he is a poetic shaman of the highest order.

Before I assumed a consistent form,

I have been a sword,

Narrow variegated,

I will believe it when it appears.

I have been a door in the air,

I have been a shinning star,

I have been a word among letters,

I have been a book originally.

I have been the light of lanterns,

A year and a half.

I have been a course,

I have been an eagle,

I have been a corricle in the seas,

I have been compliant in the banquet,

I have been a drop in a shower,

I have been a sword in the grasp of a hand,

I have been a shield in battle,

I have been a string in a harp,

Disguissed for nine years in water –

In foam.

I have been sponge in the fire,

I have been wood, in the covert,

There is nothing in which I have not been.

Neither of mother or father, when I was made,

Was my blood or my body.

Nine formed faculties.,

Of the fruit of fruits, of fruit God made me,

Of primroses and blossoms,

Of thyme hill,

Of the flowers of trees and shrubs,

Of Earth, of an earthly course,

When I was formed.

Of the flower of nettles,

Of the water of the ninth wave.

I was enchanted by Math,

Before I became Immortal,

I know the star knowledge,

Of the stars before the Earth was made.

c. Taliesin from the Cad Goddeu.

On the Power Of Trees; Mytho Poetic Beings Rooted in the Here and Reaching Hereafter;
In many mythologies Trees are embued with far reaching powers that are infact commensurate with their actual influence over the nature and wildlife of their environs. The mythologies have explored these connections further than the mere material, as can be seen in the words for Oak and Door in Irish and Welsh being related (dair — the same word for both in Irish — derwen and drws, and even English “door”, Norse dyrr and Greek thura), implying perhaps a view of the Oak as door to the Otherworld. In addittion also consider the Norse World Tree Yggdrassil.

The original poem is fragmented and full of riddles which has given rise to a wide range of interpretation and speculation. Most famous of these is Robert Graves remarkable mytho-poetical study ‘The White Goddess’.

On The Excellence of the Poetic Word; Druid Rhetoric and Shaman Transormations;
We see many details about Gwydion exisiting as diverse beings in this poem, as shapechange itself is a well known device of Druids, Bards and Shamen. Joan Halifax, in ‘Shaman: the Wounded Healer’ (1982), says: “To the heavens, to the well at the end of the world, to the depths of the Underworld, to the bottoms of spirit-filled lakes and seas, around the earth, to the moon and sun, to distant stars and back again does the shaman-bird travel. All the cosmos is accessible when the art of transformation has been mastered.” (p. 24)
Thus the Shamanic technique of flight which encompassess many transformations is often expressed, evoked and even facilitated via the Bardic power of the word, the hypnotically chanted word, the alliterative or allegorical poem, and the very wings of the song. As such, i’m sure that many will easily recognise, tales, poems and songs do indeed hold a transformative power over our individual awareness and ensuing spiritual essence, empowering changed perceptions and consequently lives and worlds..

Of the Battle of the Trees itself;
The Battle of the Trees originated when Amaethon stole a dog, a lapwing, and a roebuck from Arawn, the god of the Underworld (called Annwn). Robert Graves, who speculated that Bran and Arawn were names for the same Underworld god, wrote that the battle was probably not meant as a physical one but rather a struggle of wits and scholarship. Gwydion’s forces could only be defeated if the name of his companion, Lady Achren was guessed (her name meant “Trees”), and Arawn’s host could only be defeated if Bran’s name were guessed (which Gwydion did).
The trees who fought in the battle were also part of the Druidic alphabet known as Ogham, where each sound is represented by a pattern of notches and a particular tree. Each tree had a meaning and significance of its own, which was why Gwydion was able to win the battle: he guessed Bran’s name by the Alder branch Bran was carrying–the alder being one of Bran’s prime symbols.

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My name is Elf

To introduce myself and my machinima animations.

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Hi , my name is Celestial Elf.
Im a Digital Druid, Pagan Poet, Shamanic Soul and Machinima animation artist
celebrating nature, spirit and the ancient ways.
In respect of my being an Eco-Druid–the short version is because I find my spirituality in and through Nature.

My name is “Celestial” because this denotes the heavens, the freedom of the skies and the beyond. “Elf” because of my affinity with the Norse origins of the term (álfar) describing semi-divine beings endowed with magical powers which they may use for the benefit of mankind.

The machinima films I make are animations filmed within a three dimensional virtual reality world.
Some of my films have been noted for their lovely music and im very happy to say that man musicians including Serpentyne, Lisa Thiel, The Dolmen, World Tree Music and Trouvere have made avaliable for my use specific compositions or songs that i can use in my films.

I make ecology and mythology based machinima animations to share my message of care for nature, the environment and all of life-kind, with the hope that some among the viewers will both enjoy an be uplifted by them–but more pressingly–be inspired by them to recognize the issues I address and take whatever actions available to them, great or small, to further the causes considered. Be it sharing my film to signing a petition, or changing their life in some way.

Regards my inspiration, perhaps the best explanation of all isJ.L. Stanley’s Catechism For A Witch’s Child:

When they ask to see your gods, your book of prayers,
Show them lines drawn delicately with veins on the underside of a bird’s wing,
Tell them you believe in giant sycamores mottled and stark against a winter sky,
And in nights so frozen stars crack open spilling streams of molten ice to earth,
And tell them how you drink a holy wine of honeysuckle on a warm spring day,
And of the softness of your mother who never taught you death was life’s reward,
But who believed in the earth and the sun and a million, million light years of being.

The Legend of the Two Wolves

This is an old Cherokee story used for initiating youth and healers. It is not well known outside of Cherokee folklore, but its message is profound and universal. It is called the Legend of Two Wolves.

I will tell this story from the point of view of the contemporary world — adapting it to our time and place, as any living myth should be,

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The story begins with an old man, an Elder, and his Grandson who have been walking in the woods.
Nightfall is approaching and a sliver of moonlight and the evening star are already shining above.
The old man and boy come back into the village, where a fire is burning outside.The old man approaches ahead of the boy and carefully places a couple of logs on the fire.He puts a little tobacco on the fire. He calls out,
“Grandson come here, there is something I want to I want to tell you.”

He walks up and sits down, waiting in the silence.
The old man speaks.
“Grandson, …there is a terrible war going on inside myself, … the time has come to tell you about it because this is a battle that goes on not only inside me, but inside you, and every human in the world.”

“What kind of war is this?” Grandfather?

“There are two wolves fighting for control. A Blue Wolf and a Red Wolf…. One of the wolves, the Blue Wolf, is full of fear. It is needy and greedy and it is always wanting something, but it doesn’t know what. Its mind is filled with Judgment and competition. In time the Blue Wolf has grown big. He becomes angry and filled with envy, wanting what others have. It does not walk lightly on the Earth.”

“The Red Wolf is quite different. It is beautiful and walks gently on the Earth It is filled with reverence and love for life. It lives in the moment and takes delight in the simple pleasures of being alive. It is generous, kind and respectful of all life, its own, and the life of others, the green grasses, the insect peoples, and all the animals.

The grandson sat quietly gazing into the fire, contemplating the story that grandfather told him for awhile in silence. The grandfather add another log and offers some more tobacco and sweet grass.
Then the grandson looks at his grandfather and asks
“But who will win this war, Grandfather?”

The grandfather shifted his position and leaned forward saying softly and directly:
“It depends upon which one You feed!”

A long silence follows as they both gaze into the fire.
Then grandfather speaks:
“So now I have a question: If you have these two wolves within you, Who are You?”

The boy paused for a moment and said
“Perhaps I am both grandfather, sometimes I am one more than the other.”

The grandfather replies sharply,
“No! This is not the answer.” Take some more time with my question.”

The grandfather walked away from the fire for awhile, leaving the grandson alone. When he comes back he offers another log and offers more tobacco. After a period of silence he asks:
“Have you found the answer to my question?”

The boy replied,
“Yes, . . . I am the feeder of wolves.”

The grandfather sat in silence, satisfied the grandson now had understood.

The tale of Two Wolves is a powerful psychological and spiritual medicine to initiate the listener into life-wisdom.
The form of this ‘medicine story’ is a sacred “fire talk”, a heart-to-heart talk around a sacred fire with the aim of transmitting heart-centered and earth-honoring wisdom for living as a whole person.

For Native Americans, “Grandfathers” (or Grandmothers) is a title of respect for the spiritual powers, and for ritual elders and healers. The terms “Grandson” may have originally been a corresponding symbol for the youth or shamanic apprentice.

The focal point of the story is the awakening of the individual to personal responsibility for their life, the outcome of their choices. It presupposes a spiritual being inside, an “I Am” that is free, creative, and can feed its attention and thoughts in ways that result in life enhancement and growth towards fulfillment (Red Wolf), or in ways that thwart and cause the growth of suffering for self and others (Blue Wolf). In the Native American medicine ways to be a fully human means that you are living in a heart-centered and earth-honoring way, and that you are honoring You. To honor you is to honor your own desires, feelings, and vision of things, and to protect all that against the opinions and judgments of others, and especially, protect it against the Blue Wolf energies in your own mind. To be alive and healthy in this way means that you have reduced the size of the Blue Wolf in your life to the point where there are no major obstacles to your being you, living the life you really want and are meant to live. This is folk psychology at its best.

Priniciples for Feeding the Red Wolf:
1. Commit to honoring yourself without question.
2. Don’t give your power away. Honor your inner teachers and protect what they give you.
3. Trust your own inner sense of heart knowing (heart-NGS, felt-sense, intuition, sprit guides), Initially you may need an outer human teacher to guide you to find and consistently follow your inner teachers (what Fire Talks do).
4. Don’t accept the opinions or wishes of others for you without running it by your heart first.
5. Avoid praise and blame. Know your on value and protect.
6. Don’t let fear stop you. Follow your heart/NGS in spite of fear.
7. Drop victim thinking.
8. Muster the courage to look within and see what you find. Be honest and see warts and all, Blue Wolf habits, so you can go to work reducing these. But also see your unique wood-grained individuality.
9. Take control of your life be removing the Blue wolf energies, and reclaiming lost parts of yourself (soul recovering). Get all of you on line.
10. Get in your flow by living faithfully from your heart and honoring your unique individuality. You will know you are in your flow by the synchronicities, feedback, and NGS.
11. Be pragmatic and use those beliefs and strategies and choices that get results you want and that feel right in your heart, in your bones! Judge the value of your beliefs and choices by the results you get, and not based on the beliefs and opinions of others, or on what external authorities told you.

Are you living from your heart? Is your heart open and generous? How much sunshine is there in your heart? There can’t be much sunshine if you are not living your true life, if you are not strong enough to hold your ground, express your voice in the community, open yourself to the point of view of other people and other creatures. Anything that gets in the way of the life giving sunshine (Blue Wolf-energies) needs some good medicine to remove it and to help you cultivate the life-energies and joy you really want and need.

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Footnote on the Sacred Nature of Wolves;
Both Celestial Elf and Mikkal would like to make clear that the Wolves in this tale are purely symbolic of human energies and that along with the Cherokee and many other people, we have the greatest respect for Wolves.

The Wolf is a powerful motif in the foundational mythologies and cosmologies of peoples throughout Eurasia and North America (corresponding to the historical extent of the habitat of the gray wolf). The obvious attribute of the wolf is its nature of a predator, and correspondingly in western mythologies it has generally been associated with danger and destruction.
However as a more Earth centered spirituality – awareness of the lives and energies of other creatures, develops in the modern world, both conservation efforts and positive symbolism of the wolf are gaining ground.
Positive meanings of the Wolf as a power animal symbolic of freedom emphasize a deep connection with your intuition and instincts. On the negative side, the wolf could represent perception of a threat or a lack of trust in someone or your own feelings or actions. This spirit animal also reflects sharp intelligence in dealing with important matters.
If you have the wolf as a spirit animal, it could be an expression of your sharp intelligence and strong instincts perceiving and understanding the world around you.

Whether the wolf appears in physical form or in a dream or meditation, it may reveal that you’re using your instincts and intuition to grasp a situation well. The fact that your wolf animal spirit guide shows up could also be a call to use this capacity to deal with a recent challenge you’ve experienced in your life.

When a wolf manifests its presence as a guide in your life, it could be a call to live your life more freely, to bring the intensity of passion in your everyday endeavors, it could be an invitation to look at what supports your authentic self and the true expression of yourself. ( http://bit.ly/1jQFJas )

Wolves became extinct in Scotland and Ireland in the 1700s and sometime before that in England, persecuted by Man. Today, their European strongholds include Russia, eastern Europe and Scandinavia.
Reintroducing the Wolf to Scotland was first proposed in the late 1960s, but the idea only started to gain wider publicity and support following the reintroductions of the red wolf to the south-eastern United States in 1989, and the grey wolf to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. More information here( http://bit.ly/1jQGmAN ).

Caliban and the Witch challenges the widely-held belief that capitalism was at one time a progressive or necessary development. Reinstalling the excluded history of the Witch Hunt that consumed Europe with terror for more than 200 years, Federici demonstrates that capitalism has always relied on spectacular violence, particularly against women, people of color, workers, and those cultivating a more egalitarian future, to create its landless working class and to destroy communities and loyalties that existed outside of itself.

”A return of the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalisation including the present one, demonstrating that the continuous expulsion of farmers from land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women are necessary condition for the existence of capitalism in all times.”.

”Capitalism was the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries long social conflict…Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle -”

”The “shock therapy” of the Witch Hunt was used to terrorize rebels and visionaries, impose new discipline on the body, on female sexuality in particular, and usher in a new social system based on a landless working class and the devaluation of women’s labor.”

* * * * * * * *

The main focus of Caliban is the Witch Hunt of the 15th–17th centuries in Europe, through which “hundreds of thousands of women were tried, tortured, burned alive or hanged, accused of having sold body and soul to the devil.”

Federici argues that this repression was primarily “a war against women,” which constructed a new sexual hierarchy based on the division between male wage labor and female unpaid reproductive labor such as raising children, caring for the elderly and sick, nurturing their husbands or partners, and maintaining the home. Those accused of witchcraft were often women who lived outside this binary – as rebels, healers, midwives, sexual/gender non-conformists, or those providing forbidden knowledge of contraception or abortion.

Federici posits this systematic violence against women as one mode in the formation of capitalism when she instructs that “the witch-hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, and the beginning of the slave trade.” Contrary to “laissez-faire” orthodoxy which holds that capitalism functions best without state intervention, Federici expands upon Marx’s proposition that it was precisely the state violence of this “primitive accumulation” that laid the foundation for capitalist economics.

Principally, capitalism could not have been formed without the creation of a landless working class. People do not readily submit themselves to wage labor unless they no longer have an autonomous ability to provide for themselves or their communities. In Marx’s oft-quoted section from Capital, “these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production… And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire…The witch burning was medieval “Shock and Awe.” ”

But unlike Marx, who saw the separation of humans from their traditional land-bases as a necessary evil for the expansion of “the productive forces,” Federici emphasizes the loss of the freedom we once enjoyed through connection to the land. She points out that before the Enclosures, even the lowliest of serfs had their own plot of Earth with which they could use for just about any purpose. Federici writes, “With the use of land also came the use of the ‘commons’ – meadows, forests, lakes, wild pastures – that provided crucial resources for the peasant economy (wood for fuel, timber for building, fishponds, grazing grounds for animals) and fostered community cohesion and cooperation.” [alex knight] ( ( more details look here ) )

* * * * * * * *

”This is also what is happening today, as a new global expansion of the labour market is attempting to set back the clock with respect to the anti-colonial struggle, and the struggles of other rebl subjects – students, feminists, blue collar workers (I add farmers, unemployed, disabled, elderly, single parents, children ) …

It is not surpising then, if large scale violence and enslavement have been on the agenda, as they were in the period of ‘transition’ , with the difference that today the conquistadors are the officers of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who are still preaching the worth of a penny to the same populations which the dominant world powers have for centuries robbed and pauperized.”
Serious reading for a fuller perspective of our life and times.